Mr Baldwin's enlistment in the cause of Civil Rights was bound to change his writings. It seems he has sacrificed them, or some of their resources…. His earlier essays were rich and good. But the intermittently powerful rhetoric of last year's The Fire Next Time—a fire kindled, it's the kind of thing that happens with such documents, in the asbestos pages of the New Yorker—has become the brutal and unqualified rhetoric of the present essay [Nothing Personal].

No one who visited America before the drive for Civil Rights properly began will doubt that there were decent people there whose lives were virtually unaffected by the racial situation…. Mr Baldwin should not pretend that such people don't exist. Nor are they any worse than people in other countries, where, equally, innocence is ignorance, and where there are comparable guilts and offences. According to Mr Baldwin, the American...